CHAPTER IV.
Character of Pombal. Summary Observations, and a brief notice of the tendency and danger of Education independent of Religion.
The success of the old conspiracy against the Jesuits will not be wondered at, when we reflect upon the character of the age in which it was formed, and on the means that were used to mature it. Ignorance was the lot of the generality of men: despotism pervaded courts, and tools were never wanting to shape events to the will of the powerful. Of the parliaments, the university, and of the Jansenists, enough has been said to show the inveteracy and malignity with which they carried on their unjust persecutions of the society, and to expose the
causes of their conduct; but, in the mention which has occasionally been made of the Portuguese minister Carvalho, marquis of Pombal, the great persecutor of the Jesuits, too little has been said to account for his hatred of them; I will, therefore, here, make him the subject of a few pages.
During the reign of John V, the Jesuits were in high favour at the court of Lisbon. That king expired in the arms of the famous Malagrida. Carvalho was then a real or pretended friend of the society. The Jesuits, whom king John consulted, recommended him, with little forecast, for the embassies of London and Vienna, and, afterwards, to his successor, Joseph I, as prime minister. He soon, however, betrayed his jealousy of the power and credit of the Jesuits; and he determined to effect their ruin. The first opportunity of persecuting them arose from the treaty with Spain, for an exchange of lands and fixing new boundaries in South America, the motive of which we have
already seen. The disorder, that ensued among the Indians, the marquis imputed to the influence and ambition of the Jesuits; whence arose the absurd fable of the Jesuit king Nicolas, and of the project and attempt to usurp the dominion of South America, which, with great industry and many foul arts, he propagated all over Europe. The insurrection of the Paraguay Indians is usually called the first cause of Pombal's hatred of the Jesuits. In his ambitious views of engrossing all authority and power, he dreaded opposition from the king's brother, don Pedro, who was greatly attached to the order. A dispensation had been obtained from Rome to allow don Pedro to marry his niece, and Pombal, with confidence of success, endeavoured to prevent the marriage. He strove to inspire the king with jealousy of his brother, suggested various reasons why the princess ought to be given to some foreign prince, and recommended William duke of Cumberland in preference to all others. The king consulting his confessor, F. Moreira, that
Jesuit prevailed upon his master to reject the proposal. On that occasion, the marquis vowed vengeance, not only against the prince and F. Moreira, but against the whole order of Jesuits. Another grand cause of his rage against the society was but too well known to the missionaries. The greatest obstacle to the success of their missions among the Indians had always been the prevalence and violence of the rich European settlers, and more frequently still of the royal governors. They had often succeeded, by their credit at Madrid and Lisbon, to protect the poor Indians from personal outrage and slavery, yet it was always a difficult struggle. Pombal had made his brother, who was called Xavier Mendoza, governor general of Maragnon, in the Brazils, and never had the country before known a tyrant so despotic and outrageous. The pious queen dowager, Mariana of Austria, greatly favoured the missions. When any Jesuits sailed for Brazil, she regularly exhorted them to attend seriously to the propagation of religion, and directed them to inform
her exactly of whatever obstacles they might experience from the king's officers, and the Portuguese settlers, promising redress for their injuries and concealment of their names. In full confidence of her protection the missionaries often preferred serious complaints against Xavier Mendoza, and the wrongs of the poor Indians were frequently redressed. The minister's anger at these accusations of his brother, of which he could not discover the authors, almost drove him mad: but the queen dying, he contrived to get possession of her private papers, and discovered the channel of intelligence. His increased rage against the missionaries and Jesuits in general may be imagined. The conduct of the Jesuits, after the earthquake in 1755, afforded him fresh grounds of enmity. They spread themselves through the city and the adjacent country, everywhere inviting the people to repentance. Their sermons were everywhere attended by multitudes, their confessionals were thronged. Penitential processions were instituted, the city was edified. In their
discourses, they attributed the public calamity to a special visitation of Divine Providence, with the design of chastising the increasing depravity of morals in all ranks, and inviting them to repentance. The court was pleased with the exertions of the Jesuits. The king, in particular, thanked their provincial, and ordered the repairs of their professed house to be undertaken and defrayed by the royal treasury. This mark of royal favour sorely mortified the minister: he complained of the fanaticism of the Jesuits, especially of Malagrida, who had printed a discourse on the subject of the earthquake, which was read and highly commended by the king. His majesty had signified his intention of making a spiritual retreat, or exercise, for a week, under the direction of that celebrated father. The marquis, after innumerable other artifices to discredit the Jesuits, and their doctrine of an interfering Providence, assured the king, that a conspiracy was formed to overturn the government; that, unless Malagrida were withdrawn, a public sedition would ensue. The
king, intimidated, at length consented to his removal; but the crafty minister, dreading the resentment of the whole city, applied, the same day, to the pope's nuncio, and stating the king's authority and positive request, prevailed upon him to order Malagrida to retire from Lisbon to Setubal. He then forbade processions, or other marks of public penance and devotion, publicly alleging, that the misfortune of the city was to be attributed solely to natural causes; and by these and other means he succeeded in keeping the weak king in constant dread of imaginary plots, conspiracies, and insurrections. The king was soon completely subdued; every thing was abandoned to the disposal of the minister, his authority and power became absolute, and he soon displayed his real character in such a series of despotic and tyrannical deeds as the annals of mankind cannot equal. These may be found fully detailed in the four volumes of his life, printed at Florence in 1785; in Memoires du Marquis de Pombal; in Anecdotes du Ministère du Marquis de Pombal; and in various other
publications. His power with the king expired in 1777, when he was imprisoned, impeached, and convicted, by the unanimous voices of his judges, of enormous crimes, deserving capital punishment. The queen was prevailed upon, by the intercession of some of the foreign courts, to remit the sentence: he was only banished to Pombal, where he died in 1783. "Who would think," said the abbé Garnier, in his funeral oration for Joseph I, "that one man, by abusing the confidence and authority of a good king, could, for the space of twenty years, silence every tongue, close every mouth, shut up every heart, hold truth captive, lead falsehood in triumph, efface every trace of justice, force respect to be paid to iniquity and barbarity, and enslave public opinion from one end of Europe to the other?" Such was Sebastian Joseph Carvalho, marquis of Pombal, the enemy of the Jesuits, and prime promoter of their destruction. The very enmity of such a man is a strong negative proof of innocence and virtue.
But the cry was up; the society was to be destroyed; envy, hatred, and malice led the chace; atheism, deism, and philosophy, with their attendants, ridicule and sophistry, joined in the pursuit, and the victim was hunted down. The founders, or rather the finishers and embellishers of the modern school of reason, could not endure men, who preached doctrines and maintained principles so opposite to their own new-fangled systems. They knew, that respect for revealed truths, and reverence for established authority, the two objects of their detestation, were the main pivots on which the whole system of the education of the Jesuits turned. Deum timete, regem honorificate, "Fear God and honour the king," was their adopted maxim: religion and loyalty were never disunited by them, and the revolutionary conspirators had determined to subvert both. These everywhere opened schools of philosophy, as they affected to term it; that is, schools of impiety and irreligion; where God, his mysteries and his laws, were cited to the tribunal of proud and depraved
reason; where it was a rule to reject what was not comprehended, to ridicule whatever checked and restrained youthful passions, to begin by examining every thing incoherently, and to end by believing nothing. Infinite were the arts by which these odious maxims were infused; and they were all sweetened by previous lessons of libertinism and dissoluteness, which soiled the imagination by the most obscene productions, and corrupted the heart by the most abominable maxims. They were multiplied under the titles of poems, histories, dissertations, romances; they imposed upon the simple by affected doubts of the most established truths; by impudent assertions, that religion is now abandoned to the weak, the ignorant, the vulgar. The interest of vice soon inveigled their disciples to re-echo the cry, that lessons, drawn from belief and fear of the Supreme Being, are no more than the accents of fanaticism, superstition, and bigotry[[91]].
Jesuits were the avowed heralds of these degrading lessons, they were not philosophers. "No," says D'Alembert, one of the fathers of the new system, "the Jesuits have been teaching
philosophy two hundred years, and they have never yet had a philosopher in their body."
In the meaning of these writers, the charge must be fully admitted. Never did Jesuits harbour within their walls the maxims or the doctrines of modern sophisters. They acknowledged no philosophy, that appeared to infringe revelation or morals; but not on that account did they forego a modest claim to the title of philosophers. Those among them, who best deserved it, were actively employed in detecting, exposing, and refuting the fallacies of the modern Voltairian school; and, without affecting the peculiarity of the name, they were satisfied with being philosophers in the ancient acceptation of the term; that is, while they inculcated respect for divine revelation, and for established authority, they never ceased, during two hundred years, to furnish a succession of professors, who unfolded the principles of natural and of moral knowledge. And what branch of human
science was banished from their schools? Their public lessons might be called elementary by deep proficients; but they were accommodated to the capacity of the bulk of their youthful auditors; their object was to awaken in them the love of science, to lay the foundation on which the edifice of deep knowledge was afterwards to rise. It is allowed, that the most distinguished scholars in every branch, in past times, generally had been trained in the Jesuits' schools; and can it be said, with truth, that none of the masters, who had taught them, ever rose to eminence; that none of them were philosophers? That they never affected to assume the title is allowed: their philosophy was more circumspect. On their first principle they accepted, and they taught others to accept, without hesitation, the oracles of the church of Christ; they never blushed for their faith, or, as it was miscalled, their credulity. They believed sublime truths, that surpassed comprehension, because they feared God, who attests them, and knew that he cannot deceive.
Fixed in this first principle, they conceived no incongruity in joining to it eager researches into the secrets of nature, steady pursuit of improvement in every human science. If eminence in these justly confers the title of philosopher, it is strange, that the doctors of the new antichristian school should have overlooked the names of innumerable Jesuits in every branch of science, who were respected as philosophers, until faith in divine revelation was reckoned to depreciate all literary merit. It would be tedious to rehearse the multitude of names, which might be adduced; but I must observe, that the succession of them was never discontinued; and that, in the very last state of the society, there were men among them revered and consulted by the most eminent professors and academicians, who disdained to be mere disciples of Voltaire and D'Alembert. The best mathematicians of Italy bowed to the names of Ricati and Lecchi. The most eminent astronomers frequented the observatories of the Jesuits at Rome, Florence, and Milan, directed by the fathers Boscovich,
Ximenes, and La Grange. Fathers Meyer and Hall were celebrated through Germany, and the Polish Jesuit Poczobult, the royal astronomer at Wilno, was known wherever astronomy was cultivated. The celebrated M. La Lande, and our own astronomer, Dr. Maskelyne, did not disdain his correspondence. La Lande, in particular, in his writings, mentions these Jesuit philosophers with honour.
It is the remark of M. Chateaubriand[[92]], that, without any prejudice to other literary societies, the Jesuits were truly styled Gens de Lettres, because the whole circle of sciences was more or less cultivated among them. It was a rare case to meet with a Jesuit devoid of scientific knowledge. Their reputation, in this point of view, contributed much to the esteem in which the society was formerly held, before the strange concurrence of causes, which has not been hitherto explained, had operated upon the
catholic princes to discard them, and, in so doing, to open volcanoes beneath their thrones.
The destruction of the Jesuits was, literally, the destruction of that education, in catholic countries, by which order was established on its best and surest foundation, the belief of future rewards and punishments, and the conviction, that man was on earth but a transient being, whose chief object was to work out his salvation and eternal happiness in another world; a conviction, that could only be impressed upon the mind by the truths of revelation. It is no part of my object here to enter into a dissertation upon the comparative excellencies and defects of religious systems; but I maintain, that the distinguishing faculty of comprehending religious subjects, and the disposition to be influenced by them, interwoven in the nature of man, are proofs, that it is intended by God that he should be principally and generally influenced by religious motives; and that morality, with all its beauty, to be valuable, must originate in
that source. Let even temperate philosophers say what they will of morality, independent of religion, there is one striking advantage to states arising from the latter, which the former cannot yield. Contentment and resignation are the fruits of religion; insulated morality generates discontent, and has a perpetual tendency to doubt the justice of the inequality of conditions in this life; very naturally too, if the short race of it be all to which our hopes and fears can extend. There is also a gradation in morality; there is a confined and a refined morality. Suum cuique tribuitur is a maxim of confined morality; the refined moralist is a cosmopolite; and, still more refined, he denies the rights of meum and tuum; and the government that suffers one man to enjoy more than another is an unjust government, consequently man ought to seek a just one, and so we have the revolutionary system. It is only religion, it is only the Christian religion, which can reconcile morality to the state of man. This is the beautiful morality which binds him in social order,
which gives to Cæsar what is due to Cæsar, and, in securing to every man the rights he has obtained of property, calls upon him to rectify the selfishness of corrupted nature; to do as he would be done by, to love his brother as himself, and still farther to assimilate himself to his Master and to his God, by loving his enemies. Divine morality! which could have flowed only from a divine source! Divine legislation! dictated by God himself! It is unfortunate, that the nature of man will not permit the spirit, and even the outward forms, of a religion so adapted to the actual condition of the human species to be universal; and, that the different views taken of the text, by the variance of the human understanding, should diverge into incongruous systems, and excite religious dissentions. But, however this may be deplored, it is still more deplorable, that it should ever enter into the mind of man to establish systems of education, in which that which should be the foundation of it is totally excluded from it; that the end of knowledge should be separated
from the means of it; that the rudiments of instruction should be devoted solely to the acquisition of worldly arts, of which the operation is to be left to the direction of ignorance and selfishness. It is astonishing, with the experience men have so lately and so dearly gained, that there can be found one to approve of a system, in this country, the archetype of which has desolated Europe and ruined France. In attributing the explosion of the French revolution to the deistical and atheistical philosophers, I do not hesitate to attribute the long continuation of it to the change that took place in the forms of education; to the universities of Buonaparte[[93]], to the confining of men's interests to
the duration of life. In this country, there is a system in full operation, and patronized by some of the first characters of the state, by which a very large portion of the people will, in a few years, consist of persons able to read, write, and keep accounts, who will have no knowledge, or an erroneous one, of the duties and sanctions of religion, and whose morality will consequently be dependent on their reasoning faculties; and I am very much mistaken if those faculties will not lead to similar conceptions and similar effects as those produced by the reasoning faculties of 1788 and 1789. This opinion cannot be mistaken for one of intolerance. I think it would have been happier had the whole nation been of one accord in every point of religion; and I see, in the church of England, sufficient inducements to have restrained minds, sensible of the danger of innovation, from making a few points of mysterious doctrines a plea for separating from her; but while I say this, I am far from thinking that men should be compelled into modes of worship,
I am only sorry to see them dissenting. I am an advocate for the toleration of conscientious scruples; but there is one thing which I think no government ought to tolerate, and that is public schools openly professing to banish religious instruction; for they must prove seminaries of malcontents and democrats. The luxury and aristocracy of a few well educated rich atheists and deists afford no objection; it is of the low and of the indigent that these schools are formed, of persons who may be rendered the most valuable or the most pernicious part of the community. Homo sum: he is not a man, who can be an enemy to the mental improvement of his fellow creatures. The ignorance of the lower classes is deplorable; it is the moral duty of those in higher stations, it is the noble task of governments to raise them on the scale of intellect; education cannot be too general, but let it be in the true spirit of education. We are creatures, who depend greatly, perhaps wholly, on instruction. We can in general do little of ourselves. We must at first have
guides, and, to borrow the pithy expression of the famous bishop of Down, Jeremy Taylor, "if our guides do not put something into our heads, while children, the Devil will." The arts of reading and writing are mere mechanical instruments: to render them a blessing the soul must be fashioned into a spring of thought and action, and it behoves the fashioner to temper it justly. How desirable soever it might be, that the rising generation, enjoying the same constitution, should be united in the same mode of worship, yet, as that blessing seems unattainable in the present state of the world, it would be some consolation, if the various dissenters from the established church would hold themselves bound to insist upon the Christian religion, according to their own views of it, being taught in the new schools; and, I am free to confess, that the dissenting ministers in general are not deficient of zeal in impressing their religious principles on the minds of their followers; and it is but justice to say, that the world at large have been indebted to many of them, to Watts,
to Hartley, and to others: nor do I think, that the generality of dissenters can possibly approve of that plan, which, assembling poor children to be taught reading, writing, and figures, sends them to learn the relation between the Creator and his creature, the corruption of human nature, and the means of salvation, in a garret or a cellar, where want and ignorance, or low debauchery, are to be their preceptors. It is a mistaken benevolence, and good men of all communions should deprecate the evil, and resolve to avert it by the establishment of schools where the principal objects of education should be the principal things attended to, that the secondary ones may be made subservent to them; where, while the duties of man to God, to himself, and to society, are inculcated, the scholar may exercise his powers with books and pens to advantage, and without danger to the state. Nor, without previous oral instruction, should the Bible itself be put into the hands of readers, whether children or ignorant adults. Bible societies, consisting, beyond all doubt, of pious
men, will diffuse good or evil over the world according to the prudence with which the sacred volumes are distributed. In theology, as in natural philosophy, the uninformed mind cannot, of itself, embrace even the most incontrovertible truths: the raising of the dead and the rotation of the earth are alike incomprehensible; what is not immediately intelligible is not impressive, but when once we have been taught to observe the motion of the heavenly bodies, and are made sensible, that the power, which could assign certainty of operation to nature, must be equal to the suspension of it, astronomy and religion open upon us, and we fly to Newton and the Testament; and, seeing truths unfold themselves, we willingly take much on trust in both; certain that books, where we find so many demonstrations, are not intended to deceive us in any one point, and the resurrection of our Saviour becomes sooner solved than the precession of the equinox.
It is impossible to contemplate the
advantages arising to our fellow creatures and to society from Dr. Bell's system of education for the poor, without delight and without grateful feelings to the author, and, I may add, the still active director of it. Thousands upon thousands will bless him, while he yet lives, and a perpetual series of millions will revere his memory after he shall have joined the myriads of spirits from whom he shall himself learn the celestial allelujahs, and those things which it has not entered the mind of man to conceive.
It would be unjust not to pay a tribute of praise, also, to the founders of an institution, who, though dissenting in tenets, have adopted Dr. Bell's plan for a religious education, according to their principles: I allude to the Fitzroy free school for the instruction of six hundred children.
Catholic schools, on a similar plan, have also been established, for the education of the poor children of catholic parents. These are
superintended by zealous priests, who give religious instruction gratuitously to the pupils. All such establishments merit encouragement, not only from members of their own communion, but from all, who by influence or wealth are able to aid them.
In making religion the basis of education, no inference can be drawn, that the temporal interests and rights of mankind are to be neglected. Man, born to sorrow, having but a short time to live, is assuredly more concerned in securing an eternal than a temporal happiness; but he is sufficiently long in his transit to render his situation on earth of importance, and the ease and contentment of every individual should be the object of all governments: for this are communities formed, for this are laws made, for this does the sovereign execute the laws, and for this are individuals required to bear and to forbear. Evil must arise, and afflictions must be borne, but that government is the best imagined, and the most wisely administered,
by which the large mass of the people are enabled to pass through the years of probation with the greatest comfort, and are presented with opportunities of bettering their conditions and promoting their families. But I do not mean to interweave, here, an essay upon government and civil rights; the contemplation of the admirable system of education among the Jesuits led to these observations on the systems of general education, and in concluding them with expressly stating my opinion of the grand object of national community my view is, to leave no room for attributing the sentiments of loyalty and of religion, which, in such a work as this, have naturally fallen from my pen, to servility or bigotry.
My subject is now come to its close: it is not to be denied, that the restoration of the order of Jesuits has excited alarm; for we already see a new conspiracy formed against it, possessing all the malignity, if not all the talent, or power, of the old one. But who are the persons alarmed?
They can be such only as have a similarity of spirit and of views to those of the former enemies of the society (sir John Hippisley nevertheless excepted, whose alarm must have a very different spring); men, who have already dared to warn the clergy of England against instituting schools, in which children are to be instructed in the national religion, because of the hostile feelings which will be excited between them and the children of the anti-church institutions[[94]]; jacobinical philosophers, materialists, votaries of reason and eternal sleep, and, perhaps, some clergy, as before, of their own communion, whose interest may be affected, and who have not penetration and virtue enough to see and enjoy the motive and the justice of their restoration to religion and to letters: "ignorance," said Henry IV, in his speech to Harlay before cited, "has always borne a grudge to learning." I trust, however, and believe, that I
have proved enough to convince the reader, that the Jesuits have been calumniated; that their destruction was effected by the malice and envy of their enemies, on the one hand, and by the pusillanimity of their proper protector on the other; that, as far as authority extends, there is a great and brilliant balance in their favour; that, on the ground of reasoning, the proof of their virtue as well as of their religion does not fall short of demonstration in the account of their institute; that they are not at war with protestant governments, whose catholic subjects they are well known long to have trained up in loyalty; and, that the small number now in this country have completed those proofs of loyalty by a solemn oath of allegiance to the king.
THE